Story-making between the cracks. Crafting Stories as an academic escapology and reinvention of staff creative identities

This paper explores how the process of crafting fictional stories in ‘crack’ like liminal spaces allows for the development of personal and professional identities. By analysing several case studies where the author found herself secretly being suspended in the making of stories while working at the University, she proposes alternatives to systems that weigh heavy on staff professional lives and deter them from nourishing their creative selves. In this context the paper examines how processes of writing and materialising stories as well as reconstructing folk archetypes may act as ‘escapology’ methods that allow for the reinvention of creative identities. The case studies, amongst others, include stories that the author has co-created with Professor Jack Zipes (2019-2022) and the creation of a collaborative performance-ritual called ‘Sirens’ (2021); the author has co-created ‘Sirens’ in collaboration with several academics around the world. Revealing the uncanny stories of making behind the scenes shifts the focus from the story’s final form to the process of its creation; in particular, the ways that reconstructing narrative structures, being in conversation with found objects, and surrendering to the flow of making, can be part of a ‘hauntology’ process that overlays past histories with the formation of personal narratives. While such covert story-making spaces often ‘crack’ and oppose institutional processes the paper discusses the paradox that they often gain value when being discovered by the institution. In this sense, they remind us of what Winnicott (1971) mentioned about children’s hide and seek, ‘it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found’